Are straight people allowed to say “faggot”? Are white people allowed to say “nigger”? Generally no. Our unwritten speech codes require that those words be used only by gays and blacks, respectively (black gays can say both). Which is just as it should be: minorities can reappropriate slurs if it empowers them or even if it just humors them — I think it’s funny when fellow gays sarcastically say “Hey faggot” to me. But it wouldn’t be so funny if, say, my heterosexual boss said it. Sorry, straight people: you don’t get to say “faggot.” (I can still be fired for being gay in most U.S. states, so you still have the better end of the bargain.) Speech codes are one of the many social devices that keep us from all murdering each other with our bare hands in the grocery aisle.
But speech codes deeply offend conservatives, which is the point Ann Coulter was making when she said this last week: “I was going to have a few comments about the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards. But it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot.’” (more…)
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- Sex-saturated media arrives in China (Dallas Morning News)
- Doyle turns down $600,000 in federal abstinence money (TwinCities.com)
- Angry Ex Distributes Explicit DVDs Using Old-Fashioned Windows (Sex Drive Daily)
- Weekly Feminist Reader (Feministing)
- Attack of the Red-Carpet-Munchers! (Simon Doonan; NYO)
- My Date with Ann (Steven Weber; HuffPo)
- The Age of Mesploitation (Sugarbank)
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…It wasn’t so long ago that the male collegians of America hid their copies of Playboy deep inside their sock drawers, and the naked women tucked therein were glamorous, unknowable princesses from a media empire far, far away. These days, when anyone can run a virtual media empire out of a dorm room, student-generated sex magazines, some with the imprimatur of university financing and faculty advisers, are becoming a fact of campus life. Their subjects and contributors are the gals — and guys — down the hall; their target audience is male, female, straight, gay and everything in between. Not all are as overtly titillating as Boink. The grande dame of the group is Squirm, a “magazine of smut and sensibility,†which has been circulating since 2000 at Vassar, once the inspiration for the awkward lunges and contraceptive pessaries of Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel “The Group.†Topics considered within its pages have included bondage and sadomasochism, the history of the condom and the fluidity of gender. At Yale, there is the earnest, instructive SWAY, whose title is an acronym for Sex Week at Yale, a student-run symposium held biennially there since 2002, with administrative blessing and a corporate sponsor, Pure Romance, a company whose representatives sell sexual aids for women at Tupperware-like “parties.†The premiere edition included a slightly breathless interview with the porn star Jesse Jane along with an essay by the conservative Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D., a former Yale economics lecturer, which concluded: “Marriage is for lovers. Hooking up is for losers.†In 2004, H Bomb arrived at Harvard with slightly loftier intellectual aspirations: its founders, Katharina Cieplak-von Baldegg and Camilla Hrdy, positioned it as a “literary arts magazine about sex and sexual issues.†Vita Excolatur followed shortly after at the University of Chicago (its title a truncated version of the university’s motto, translates roughly as “Life Enrichedâ€), proclaiming itself “eager to engage all interested parties, from Republican pro-choicers to pro-Foucauldians.†And Columbia now has, simply, Outlet, whose second issue, published online in December 2006, includes a review of eight vibrators and an article on “vaginal personality†— shades of Dr. Betty Dodson, the masturbation instructress — subtitled “How snarky is your punani?â€
(more…)
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By Elizabeth Nash
Dolce & Gabbana are wowing the fashion world on the catwalks of Milan, but feminists in Spain have condemned their latest advertising campaign as sexist and violent, throwing the flamboyant duo into a hissy fit and prompting withdrawal of the images.
The ads, which appeared in Spain on Monday, show a half-naked man holding a scantily clad woman to the ground by her wrists while four predatory hunks look on. Spain’s Women’s Institute, a government organisation linked to the Labour Ministry, described the scene as offensive to women’s dignity and an incitement to sexual violence. (more…)
Click on the photo to view the entier set of ads at La Repubblica.
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- Sorority Evictions Raise Messy Issue of Looks and Bias (NYT)
- Weekly Feminist Reader (Feministing)
- What a Bad Museum Exhibit Can Teach You About Blogging (ProBlogger)
- MARIE AND JACK: A Hardcore Love Story receives an NC-17 rating from the MPAA (Comstock Films)
- RKB Need interviewees – “straight” women who’ve slept with women
- Uncircumcised pupils sent home (BBC News)
- This advert isn’t sexist. Yeah right. (Stuff.co.nz)
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Steam is coming out of violet’s ears, with good reason:
When I write my column for the Chronicle/SFGate, I don’t expect to get too fucked with as writer, though after the years of seeing how typically slanted and sex-negative the mainstream media is about sex and porn, I knowingly *hope* for fair treatment.
Last week I wrote a column about altporn, and interviewed the top director in this porn genre, Eon McKai. Halfway through the day SFGate ran a story about an anti-porn protest at the armory building, which the good people at Kink.com just bought. The piece that ran in the SFGate the same time mine did was slanted in favor of the anti-porn stance.
When SFGate put the anti-porPublishn piece up, they changed the front page copy on my column description to remove the word “porn” and changed it to “onscreen sex”. They moved my column to the *very bottom* of the page, and put the anti-porn piece as the top headline — for two solid days. SFGate clobbered my pro-porn piece with one that literally labled Kink’s employees as “manacled performers”. (more…)
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The famous, or perhaps notorious, model Anna Nicole Smith died last week, prompting a tsunami of media coverage. Here’s a look at the reasons for all the hoopla. One shouldn’t be embarrassed about finding her story fascinating. (more...)
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By Douglas McCollam
It was just before 3 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon last November when a contingent of police gathered outside the home of Louis Conradt Jr., a longtime county prosecutor living in the small community of Terrell, Texas, just east of Dallas. Though the fifty-six-year-old Conradt was a colleague of some of the officers, they hadn’t come to discuss a case or for a backyard barbeque. Rather, the veteran district attorney, who had prosecuted hundreds of felonies during more than two decades in law enforcement, was himself the target of an unusual criminal probe. For weeks the police in the nearby town of Murphy had been working with the online watchdog group Perverted Justice and producers from Dateline NBC’s popular “To Catch a Predator†series in an elaborate sting operation targeting adults cruising the Internet to solicit sex from minors. Dateline had leased a house in an upscale subdivision, outfitted it with multiple hidden cameras, and hired actors to impersonate minors to help lure suspects into the trap. As with several similar operations previously conducted by Dateline, there was no shortage of men looking to score with underage boys and girls. In all, twenty-four men were caught in the Murphy sting, including a retired doctor, a traveling businessman, a school teacher, and a Navy veteran.
Conradt had never shown up at the Dateline house, but according to the police, using the screen name “inxs00,†he did engage in explicit sexual exchanges in an Internet chat room with someone he believed to be a thirteen-year-old boy (but was actually a volunteer for Perverted Justice). Under a Texas law adopted in 2005 to combat Internet predators, it is a second-degree felony to have such communications with someone under the age of fourteen, even if no actual sexual contact takes place. Armed with a search warrant — and with a Dateline camera crew on the scene — the police went to Conradt’s home to arrest him. When the prosecutor failed to answer the door or answer phone calls, police forced their way into the house. Inside they encountered the prosecutor in a hallway holding a semiautomatic handgun. “I’m not going to hurt anybody,†Conradt reportedly told the police. Then he fired a single bullet into his own head. (more…)
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Feisty, take-no-prisoners columnist (she nicknamed President Bush ‘Shrub’) and author Molly Ivins, passed away yesterday, after a long battle with breast cancer:
The 62-year-old writer was a rare commodity in Texas – a liberal – who wrote a twice-weekly column that appeared in at least 300 newspapers. Based in Austin, her commentary appeared in national magazines from Harper’s to Playboy, and her Texas drawl was heard parsing events on shows ranging from 60 Minutes to The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.
She did not confine her humorous skewering to Republicans. She aimed it at wherever she perceived pomposity or wrongdoing.
Of the Gore-Bush presidential race in 2000 she said, “It’s like having Ted Baxter of the old ‘Mary Tyler Moore’ show running for president: Gore has Ted’s manner and Bush has his brain.”
more from the obituary here.
[via Feministing]
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